I realize that it may be too early to start implementing cryptocurrencies in HF, but I wish to brainstorm on cryptocurrencies and blockchain proofs. I think this is one of the most important and critical parts of the vision - I am persuaded that the world will be a better place when we will be able to have real chats with real friends in virtual places, and use virtual cryptocash to pay for real beer in real places, and there could positive feedback loops between the two. For example what do you guys think of http://ethereum.org/ ? Seems quite compatible with HF and could be used for other things besides payments (e.g. proof of identity).

Moneyyy. yes its defiantly important the strip is currently flat but money cyrypto currency will eventually make the world go round.
If people cant buy and sell their skills and creations hf will die on its ass.Etheriums lovely website talked about alotta things I don’t understand. But it also talked about Bitcoin which seems like a currency targeted at hippies but used for crime lol.I love a broad sweeping unsubstantiated statement. I consider myself to have a great understanding of the criminal mentality , hell I watched all of breaking bad.These currencies sound like a great way to anonymously launder money.
You talked about proof of identity.That is key to online accountability trading intellectual property protection etc.
But people really like their anonymity. can both exist?

Think of Ethereum as an extension of the distributed blockchain concept pioneered by Bitcoin. Ethereum is “an operating system and programming environment for a blockchain.” It supports all that you can do with Bitcoin and much more, including proof of ownership and identity, via “smart contracts.” Proof of identity does not require giving up anonymity. For example I can establish a pseudonymous identity (like many people do in Second Life) and prove that a transaction has been done by that specific identity via the info stored in the blockchain.

Re “These currencies sound like a great way to anonymously launder money.”

Well, cash has always been a great way to anonymously launder money, but I wouldn’t want to give up cash. In general, I prefer a world where bad things can happen occasionally, to a world where everyone is watched by Big Brother all the time. But we are getting close to politics, not a good idea in a technical forum…

In there they are basically saying that HF will have currency that is some sort of cryptocurrency and that the people who are running the network will be rewarded with that currency. Using ethereum would be nice solution. No matter what it is HF is starting to sound like Decentralised Autonomous Organisation to me. Very cool.

I actually played around with libbitcoin and HF some time ago on made this:

I used the free and public API of the https://blockchain.info/ to query the blockchain and libbitcoin to make transactions and again the blockchain.info to push them to miners. In current version I can only see my wallet balance and transfer btc out of the wallet to predefined address. And it fails from time to time So no were near to usable wallet but I learned a lot while doing it. AND I needed to change the MyAvatar, Avatar, AvatarManager and so on… So it is quite lot of low level changes.

BUT what I found and learned while doing this was that we could make BTC wallet with JS if we just had ability to to communicate the public addresses with other avatars and store data(private addresses) from the JS. I mean if I click another avatar on screen I can currently figure out which avatar I have clicked. What I currently cannot figure out is it’s public key if that isn’t supported by HF c++ side. But imagine if I could do this: When I am clicking another avatar my JSWallet communicates with that avatars JSWallet exchanging public keys and then I could just type in the amount to transfer. If JS script could talk to another avatars JS script we could actually have all the cryptocurrencies in HF.

“Hificoin” could be easily implemented as a custom cryptocurrency powered by Ethereum. But why reinvent the wheel? Why not use something that is already used and traded over the Internet (and in brickspace as well) by a critical mass of users?

A possibility is just using Bitcoin as it is.I think High Fidelity should use plain old Bitcoin unless there are strong reasons not to (e.g. important requirement that can’t be met by Bitcoin as it is).

Yeah, I tend to agree. I was just saying that “hificoin” was the immediate thing to come to mind when you bring up the topic. Although, I don’t know specifically what sort of currency-related problems they are hoping to solve, so I don’t feel like I can say what they should or should not do.

To make a working BTC wallet with JS all we need is some way to make http-request from our JS scripts. World is full of JSON accessible wallets.(At least I think so.). All we need is some kind of way to communicate with the outside world in order to immerse the BTC experience into HiFi. With http-access we could also query and update public key database of the avatars in order to have smooth exchanging of the coins. I mean point, click and send.

How to make feature requests??

World is full of cool things that we can access through JSON. I think it would be cool to be able to embed those things in Hifi using JS. Should be plenty of use cases for http-requests from JS other then BTC.

@Polac - Not sure if there is a formal mechanism for feature requests, but I guess the developers are reading the forum. See also Github and Gitter (link to Gitter chat here https://github.com/highfidelity/hifi)